Stupid Question

I understand that I may be a bit thick here but it appears to be written in C.

Now I get that you can write a new C compiler these days, compile it in GCC or whatever and then get it to compile itself.

But this is the first C compiler. How did they compile it? By hand?

Doesn't work for me

I write documents in Drive (or what was Docs before). When I have finished I email them to my editor. At the moment that involves downloading as text and then uploading to Gmail again.

This is not made any simpler by sharing. I do not want to force the recipient to log on to Docs but the sent "link" is to a live version rather than a downloadable format of my choice. In essence this is just an extension of the "share" option and is not even as good as the "email as an attatchment" option in docs (which for some reason gets caught in spam filters much more and only allows a single attatchment)

Higher or lower than background?

Are these just port scans or the usual password guessing that hits any machine with an open SSH port? http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2012/01/06/brute-force-password-guessing-attempts-on-ssh/

Mama Mia

MrsJ got this out but even she could not stomach it. I don't mind musicals, I have even hummed along to Abba in the past but third rate singing and acting that made a chair look like John Guilgud was beyond the pale. Managed 30 mins.

GPS at altitude

Apparently all GPS units that can work over 18km (which is pretty feasible) are classified as munitions. Have you got access to unrestricted GPS? (of course you know all of this I'm sure)

http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/mtcr (item 11)

Multiple Cards

I have both Visa and Mastercards and choose which to use. Presumably with an SIM or phone based device I could choose one to use. With SD its could require 2 or more slots to let me do this.

Not that I am even slightly considering waving my phone around in this manner.

Call Captain Kirk

Surely you just point out a logical error or give contradictory input and the thing blows up. Or is everything I have ever learned about artificial inelligence wrong?

Can't find it

Found the Town Hall but can't find her jubbliness on street view.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Neuville-en-Ferrain&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Neuville-en-Ferrain,+Nord,+Nord-Pas-de-Calais,+France&gl=uk&ll=50.750018,3.152491&spn=0.002257,0.00478&t=h&z=18&layer=c&cbll=50.749979,3.152715&panoid=8wbqslQ3dyAP1NBmhByrgw&cbp=12,157.76,,0,2.22

No surprise

These drugs are basically testosterone inhibitors. They are therefore good at stopping things that testosterone causes such as male pattern baldness and prostate enlargement. Testosterone is also responsible for things like libido which you might want to keep.

Nice to have some figures on it though.

For us freetards

...there is Ubuntu One, which shares many features such as the multi machine sync of Dropbox and contact sync. Also some browser sync and Tomboy notes support.

Free to 2GB. 20GB for $2.99/mo

Also a mobile streaming audio thing that I have not really got my head around but then I use my phone to talk to people.

Wetware issues

The real trick is going to be allowing the user to look around whilst zoomed in without vomiting. There will be major discrepancies between head movement and visual changes which are unlikely to be pleasant.

Crimble??

May I nominate Crimble to join lappy and others in the Reg Room 101?

Simply brilliant

I can't have been the only one spending the day wishing I was hurtling through the Spanish countryside and beating my way through forest. Blair Witch?? It was more sleeping beauty in my head as I tried to rescue PARIS.

More than appointment

The EMIS PCS system does more than appointment. It does everything from prescribing to managing blood test results. We had half a day of hand writing prescriptions when we could work out what patients were actually taking. Thank goodness our document management system runs serparately so we could at least see hospital letters etc.

Central servers were a major policy push of the late Connecting for Health back when it was NPfIT. PCS is really not a datacentre product and will sit very happily on a single server. The hosted system scale a bit by separating out the database server from the front end and attatching it all to some big storage but EMIS still runs serparate clusters of servers for areas.

This was our third half day outage this year. It is not that rare.

Standard solution

I am not particuarly gifted in the ways of mult datacentre server management but the ultimate solution appeared to be to turn it off and on again.

Outsourced to Renholm Industries?

Fuller ears

It is pretty serious weight gain when your ears get fat.

Twisting passages, all alike

Central Manchester is the same. Streetview pictures and maps bear no relation to each other and you are sent through portals all over the place. Impossible to make any progress from some locations.

Tickle me Elmo joke

The HR manager at the "Tickle me Elmo" factors offers a job to a new young lady and then explains here duties to her. She starts the next day.

Well the next day comes and within half an hour of the start of production the foreman is up complaining about the new girl. The whole line has come to a halt because of this girl.

"What's wrong with her?"

"You had better come and see."

The foreman leads the manager to the production line which indeed all backed up. At the front is the new employee with a pile of red velour and a bag of marbles which she is slowly sewing on to each Elmo.

The manager looks stunned for a moment and then bursts out laughing. It is a couple of minutes before he, gasping, regains the power of speech.

"No, no, no" he wheezes. "I told you to give them two test tickles."

Cheapest tarriff

I use phone for work. I think I am too busy/lazy to payg. Paying £15 a month but never get near to using the minutes. I like having a paper bill and DD from the work account though. I don't want to be going to a supermarket or a cash machine to top up.

I miss NTK

and in particular the "Puerile Google mispellings" feature

http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=angels+prostate

They are enormous

You don't really get the scale of these things until you view all the pictures all the way down the road to Lidl. They are so far away (and therefor huge) that the car does not appear to move relative to them at all.

Incompressible?

I don't really understand that.

However I can't think of a word to described that which I can't understand. Could anyone help me?

Little Scouts

The junior section of the Scouting movement - 6-7 year olds - are Beavers. How my work colleagues laughed when I started helping with the Beavers. Three years later they still laugh as they are exceptionally childish.

Paris - because she takes Beavers seriously.

The Sound of Silence

Certainly in their natural state they are silent, but this is simple a business opportunity.

Sooner or later they will be required to make a noise. Initially they will have a vaguely synthetic engine roar. Then we will have a ringtone like market.

I fancy my car sounding like a Castle class steam locomotive, boy racers could choose and F1 race car, people with pink fluffy seat covers could have the Ninky Nonk and someone somewhere would have a car that sounds like Katy Perry.

There are fortunes to be made. And it was my idea!

Seems quite good

16% of GDP and 11% of carbon emissions? Someone must be making the averages up somewhere.

Although I would say that as I am a doctor am rarely airbourne.

(I used to have a coat like that)

Probably safer

to relocate the whole thing to Phobos.

The eye of faith

http://local.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&ie=UTF8&ll=55.934024,-4.759325&spn=0.000816,0.002068&t=h&z=19

Could that be it? One wing and the tail. Or it could be some sand.

Grenade? Well its a bomber.

Fairford

Fairford is the UK landing strip on standby for this sort of thing. Basically huge runway and not much else doing makes it ideal.

Would try to bunk of work to see that, probably hauling the kids out of school on the way!

The Unconscious Emergency

The old chestnut of the Unconscious Emergency gets trotted out a lot in these circumstances.

First of it is pretty rare that someone pitches up unable to communicate (or without someone else who can). It is even rarer that this is caused by some pre-existing condition. Mostly they have had some sort of catastrophe such as being hit by a car or a heart attack or some blood vessel stopping working for some reason. None of these helped by past history much.

Allergies? Well occasionally relevant but again not that common - and certainly not as common as medical records say they are!

But that is not the biggest problem. The big problem is that for these few cases where past history is useful - say epilepsy, type one diabetes etc a centralised record is a rubbish way of dealing with it. Medic alert jewelry conveys the same information, does not have too many access problems and works where the record does not - supermarkets, England, France, Mt Kilimanjaro.

So please no more about Mr Unconscious (one of the duller Roger Hargreaves books) - it is a myth.

I'm no rocket scientist

...but why would you want to move hydrogen from the engines to the fuel tanks?

Searching the Property

I suspect that there is a policy of having a look around as they have watched those films where the hero(ine) calls 911,999,112,etc but the villain pulls the phone out of the wall then ties them up in the basement. Passes phone to toddler and looks innocent when the cops turn up.

Its got to be better they search than the hero having to pretend to seduce the villain and then stabbing them with an improvised weapon made out of a shelf bracket. If nothing else we can all get out of the cinema half an hour earlier.

Arterial bleeds

Arterial bleeds are the tricky bit. There is a lot of pressure behind them. 130mmHg (about 17k pascals or, to put it more clearly, 3603 Norris/nanoWales ) is a lot of pressure to deal with physically. It needs to chemically spasm the artery and even that is tricky. You would also find it tricky to apply as bleeding wound tend to be filled will blood (duh) and getting to the vessels would require a lot of swabbing.

Two square feet - difficult to get an injury like that without something else really bad happening. Still, if it works it would be brilliant. Nose bleeds sorted with a simple spray rather than all that sitting around pinching your nose. Squirt it through the end of you gastroscope in a general splash it around way to stop your bleeding ulcer or varicies. And of course all those severe injuries in civilian life when you need stabilisation before getting to the hospital. Never mind the military - whoever does this will make a fortune in the civilian medical sector.

Netizen

an ugly word for a concept almost too horrible to imagine

Swindon's not Wiltshire

At the risk of being extremely pedantic Wiltshire is still going to have its speed cameras. Swindon is a separate authority. So Salisbury, Devizes etc etc will still have them.